Sword of the Bright Lady (45 page)

“More like him?” Faren's eyebrows were dancing violently. “This one priest of War has all but started a war. Two of him would wreck the Kingdom. And we dare not promote him. We cannot intervene so directly. I know you disagree, Ser, but it is our Church and our future, so we must play our hand as best we see fit.”

Gregor was in too good of a mood to admit defeat. “Black Bart's corpse is ash scattered to the winds, I've got a pocket full of tael, and your Vicar and the Pater raise armies in spite of your fine speech. This is a good day for the Bright, whatever you say.”

It wasn't a good day for Christopher. When the carriage rolled into Burseberry, Karl and the mercenaries broke open the barn. Now the prisoners stood beside the chapel, three lines of dirty, ragged, unhappy men. They grumbled and looked askance at the guards they outnumbered, until Karl threw down the twisted helmet and giant black sword. After that they hung their heads in silence.

“What am I supposed to do with them?” Christopher asked in despair.

“By the King's law, you can take their heads for tael,” Gregor said.

Christopher couldn't do that. He couldn't kill men for loot just because they had lost.

“What about Church law?” he asked Faren.

“The Church has never had prisoners of war before.” Faren was even more rancid than he had been in the carriage. “We cannot atone so many at once. We cannot send them all to Kingsrock.”

“If you feel generous, you can enslave them until they work off their ransom,” Gregor suggested. “A few years of hard labor will do their spirits good.”

“But then who will feed their families?” Christopher asked. Hadn't they just done that wild ride to save the men's families?

Gregor shrugged, not with indifference but in defeat.

Christopher turned to Faren. “Help me.”

Faren looked at him, sighed heavily, and turned away from the prisoners to have a quiet conversation.

“Your assistance to date is deeply appreciated, Ser,” he said to Gregor. “But if you would be willing, we would ask more from you.”

Gregor's lip curled in distaste, but he nodded. While the Cardinal bent his head and muttered a simple prayer, the knight stepped over to the woodpile and fetched the ax.

Then Faren waved at the first prisoner in line, who shuffled forward and without even being told, knelt in front of Christopher's wood-chopping stump and laid his head on it.

Christopher was too stunned and horrified to object.

The ax rose and fell, sinking into the wood next the man. He flinched, slowly opened his eyes in disbelief.

“Goodman,” Faren said, his voice deep and sad, “we will not punish you for the sins of your master. Nor can we address all the sins of the world. I am going to let you go, on the understanding you will never again take up arms against our Church. I would also counsel you to look to your affiliation, but that is your affair. Suffice to say, do not allow your Yellow to lead you into foolish acts again, or you will lose everything.”

He offered the man a hand, helping him to his feet.

“It's a long walk home. I suggest you get started.” From his purse he handed the man a silver piece. “Pay for your lodging and meals. Do not beg, steal, or tarry, or I'll have you to Kingsrock.”

The man bowed, scraping the ground as he retreated, and ran from the village without looking back.

“He's evil,” Gregor said, although without force.

“We cannot address all the sins of the world,” Faren repeated under his breath, and then he called forward the next man.

The ritual went on for a while, but then it changed. The ax still missed, but when the man stood, Faren shook his head.

“Your Red is more danger to your family than is your absence. You go into the wagon, to Kingsrock, to either atone or hang.”

Christopher had just gotten comfortable with the judging, pleased to see that less than a quarter of the men were being classified as Red, when the ritual changed again.

This time, when the man put his head on the block, his eyes burning with hatred and fear, Faren froze him in place with the Celestial command Rana had used on Bart.

“Do not miss this time,” he told Gregor sadly.

“Why?” Christopher asked. “Doesn't he get a chance to atone?” How could the Cardinal have judged this man without even asking him a question?

“He is Black,” the Cardinal said. “They never atone, and I am not certain I would let one if they would.”

“Have no sympathy for him,” spoke up one of the prisoners still in line. “He was our sergeant. When Bart was displeased, he would let Bugger Bill abuse us.”

“Yes,” another agreed, “and worse. The only reason we did not kill him in the barn was fear that Bart still lived.”

“In fact,” said one of the prisoners from the wagon, “you should return us to the barn for a brief period, so that we might rectify the imbalance of the world. Bill has given much and has much to receive.”

“One time he—” another prisoner started, but Christopher cut him off.

“I get it,” he said resignedly, and the ax fell.

There was only one more Black in the group.

“If Black Bart were truly evil, then why so few truly evil men?” Christopher asked the Cardinal as he was getting back into his carriage.

“Perhaps you already killed them all, when you slew his knights,” Faren said, unconcerned.

“Or he killed them himself,” Karl answered. “Blacks do not make good soldiers. They are undisciplined. Even the Darkest fiend prefers an army of Yellows, or at least Reds.”

Then Karl idly recited a bit of doggerel.

White for right,

Blue for tame,

Green for name,

Yellow for gain,

Red for pain,

Black for none.

“I've never liked that ditty,” Faren complained. “Tame is a poor choice of word. Law would be better.”

“But that doesn't rhyme,” Karl said.

“Spare me your literary critique,” Christopher said in exasperation. “What does it
mean
?”

“You have never heard the Color Poem before?” Karl asked in surprise. Even Faren raised his eyebrows.

“The Pater is new here, remember,” Svengusta said. He had been uncharacteristically silent so far. Christopher was guessing the old man was a little upset at having his wood yard turned into an abattoir. Christopher agreed; he was planning on burning that stump and getting a new one as soon as Faren left town.

“It means,” Svengusta explained, “those are the reins that drive the affiliations. White works for the right of everyone. Blue serves the law. Green is driven by honour. Yellow seeks gain. Red can only be compelled by threat of punishment. And Black does evil for its own sake, even sometimes to its own undoing.”

Now it made sense. The five stages of moral development: universal rights, social contract, peer approval, desire for gain and fear of punishment, and then absolute amoral sociopathy—not a stage, but the lack of any moral compulsion at all.

“There was even a Green in that lot,” Faren said. “But I did not want to make his life harder by exposing him to his fellows. Perhaps their next lord will be less Dark. It wouldn't be hard. It was only a matter of time until something drove Bart over the edge, into madness.”

“The loss of his ring,” Christopher said. Then he couldn't remem­­ber if anyone had told Faren about the ring. “Did we tell you about the ring?”

“I heard about it, no thanks to you,” Faren said, while Svengusta blushed. “This is a secret that should not be bandied about, agreed. But in the future, keep me better informed. Speaking of secrets,” he added, suddenly cranky again, “you are released from my command. You may dispose of your sword, and its truth, as you see fit. Possibly we overplayed our hand. We did not intend to start a war.”

Christopher breathed a sigh of pure relief. And immediately moved on to the next problem.

“I'll need that mill soon.” He was eager to get back to industrializing people instead of killing them.

Faren rolled his eyes, even grumpier than before, if possible. “The answer is no. It would be easier to redirect the river than to undo so many years of legal contract. But be silent, Pater, we are not deaf to your needs. The Saint has sent you an offering, a loan from our church to yours of valuable property. I left it at the Knockford Church. Make it work or do without.”

Christopher wanted to ask more, but Faren would have none of it. His carriage trundled away, followed by Bart's wagon with the prisoners marked for atonement.

“You've let an awful lot of tael run off,” Gregor said, referring to the majority of prisoners that were released. “But I find I cannot be unhappy with your choice. And we should still see a little more from that wagon-load. I doubt any of them will atone.”

“Does anybody ever atone?” Christopher asked darkly. So far, every person he'd sent to Kingsrock had wound up on the wrong end of a rope.

“Sometimes, Brother,” Svengusta soothed. “Sometimes.”

That night, after dinner, when he and Svengusta had a moment alone, he asked another question that had been bothering him badly.

“We barely got enough tael out of Bart to promote someone to second rank. But he was fifth rank. I don't get it. You're the only one I dare ask, Brother. Please help me.”

Svengusta's eyes grew wide as he studied Christopher's clueless face. The old man shook his head in disbelief.

“I had thought your past mystifying; now I find it unimaginable,” Svengusta said softly. “But do not elaborate. I am content to let you and the Saint bear that knowledge.

“But your answer, which every child knows, is that while death reduces a man by a whole rank, it enriches his slayer only by a fraction of his rank. One-sixteenth, to be exact.”

The precision of the number did not bother Christopher as much as the magnitude. Trading tael was not a zero-sum game; it was a losing game. For every knight created, sixteen commoners would have to die. To create all those knights, Bart really must have slaughtered whole villages.

The blood on his wood stump suddenly seemed inconsequential.

25.

BOTTLED WATER

Standing in the Knockford Church vault, Christopher scratched his beard, annoyed. He'd asked for a watermill and gotten five bronze bottles. He was just a little confused.

Svengusta wasn't. “Faren said it would be easier to redirect the river than unmoor the mill from the miller's hands, and so he has. But do not ask him for a second miracle; these have stood in the Cathedral fountain for at least a century.”

The bottles were not graceful enough to qualify as art in Christopher's opinion, being heavily cast out of inch-thick metal. But each one did bear an image of a god, Ostara, and her four consorts from the tapestry back in Burseberry.

“How is this supposed to help again?”

“Perhaps an experiment, since you're so fond of them,” Svengusta said with a laugh. “But not in here—outside!”

Christopher struggled with one of the heavy metal bottles. It had a bronze stopper screwed into the top, with markings carved into it. He couldn't quite read them, and the bottle was too heavy to hold up to his face, so he unscrewed the stopper and looked more closely at it while they walked through the halls.

The words were in Celestial. “Stopper” was the first word. Well, yes, it was a stopper. Nice that they labeled it.

He read the second word aloud, because it was so unexpected. “Stream,” he said. “What does that mean?”

But then he noticed water was gushing from the bottle.

“Ack . . .”

He tried to stick the stopper back in, but Svengusta screamed at him and waved his hands.

“No!” yelled the old man. “Read the command word, the com­mand word!”

Christopher looked at the bottle cap again. “Fountain” was the next word, but that couldn't be right. The last word was “Geyser,” so he read it aloud before his brain considered the wisdom of such an act.

The bottle kicked him in the stomach like an angry mule. Water gushed out of the bottle like, well, like a geyser, knocking Svengusta to the floor and washing him flailing down the hall.

“Stopper,” Christopher shouted, wrestling with the bottle, and the flow stopped. “Brother, I'm sorry.” He sat in the pool of water where the bottle had knocked him down. “Are you all right?”

Svengusta sat up, soaking wet, watching the water run down the hall. Novitiates and servants stuck their heads out of doors. They did not succeed at stifling their giggling.

“Now you know what it does,” Svengusta said, “and I know why Helga squeals when you use the word ‘experiment.'”

“How did all that water come out of this bottle?”

“Brother,” Svengusta said with exaggerated gentleness, “it's magic.”

“Well, duh, but how does it work? How long will the effect last?”